The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [316]
Lord Simon then pointed out that, as the Americans and Russians wanted a trial, ‘We must therefore compromise or proceed unilaterally.’ By that stage of the war the latter option was almost unthinkable, yet he proposed publishing a document that put the British case against Hitler and then executing him ‘without opportunity of reply’. This would be based upon the Allied pronouncement of 13 March 1815 that had declared Napoleon beyond the law, which he recalled having taken place after the battle of Waterloo rather than three months before it. Churchill then stated that he ‘Will not agree to [a] trial which can only be a mock trial’, and the Secretary of Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, asked whether ‘If Hitler is a soldier, we can refuse to give him quarter?’ Churchill concluded the discussion by saying that Simon should liaise with the Americans and Russians ‘to establish a list of grand criminals and get them to agree that these may be shot when taken in the field.’97 In the event this expedient was not adopted, and instead the long process of putting the senior surviving Nazis on trial was established by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which for all its drawbacks did lead to justice being seen to be done.
The circumstances and macabre atmospherics of Hitler’s death in his bunker were truly weird, made weirder by his decision to marry his girlfriend just before they killed themselves.98 ‘It’s lucky I’m not married,’ Hitler had said on the night of 25 January 1942. ‘For me, marriage would have been a disaster… I’d have had nothing of marriage but the sullen face of a neglected wife, or else I’d have skimped my duties.’99 Eva Braun felt the same, having before the war sighed to the Daily Telegraph’s Berlin correspondent, ‘It is too bad that Hitler became Reich Chancellor – or else he might have married me.’100 The official who conducted his wedding to Eva Braun on Sunday, 29 April 1945 was Walter Wagner, the deputy surveyor of rubbish collection in the Pankow district of Berlin.101 One of the many bizarre aspects of the ceremony was Wagner’s asking the couple, in accordance with Nazi marriage law, whether they were both Aryan.102 (They answered in the affirmative.) When she signed the register, Eva began her surname with a B, before it was pointed out to her ‘that her new name begins with H’.103 In more than one sense it was a shotgun wedding: Eva was worried about what people would make of her if Hitler didn’t marry her, so in order to conform to bourgeois sensibilities she finally got her man. Just before the wedding the groom had dictated his Last Will and Testament to his secretary Traudl Junge, a predictable spew of anti-Semitism and self-justification. Junge was at the wedding reception, and recalled thinking to herself: ‘What will they raise their champagne glasses to? Happiness for the newly married couple?’
After testing a cyanide capsule on their Alsatian bitch Blondi – who they obviously felt did not want to live in a post-Nazi Germany either – Eva swallowed one and Hitler shot himself at about 3.30 p.m. on Monday, 30 April 1945. The bunker’s guards first guessed that Hitler was dead when they saw his Staff’s cigarette smoke coming out of the ventilation shafts; he had been a fanatical anti-smoker.104 When